A conventional crusher must have a frame of significant mass in order to withstand the day-to-day tasks of crushing the material that is fed into the inlet opening of the crusher. So bulky are conventional crushers that the costs of transporting one between the east and west coasts of the United States prohibits construction of such a machine on the opposite coast from where the potential buyer of the machine resides.
Most continuously fed crushers just bolt down and may have some items attached to them and weigh on the order of forty tons. So-called bucket crushers such as in commonly owned U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,915,972 and 6,871,807 are usually not continuously fed because they must interrupt processing the debris in order to scoop up debris in their bucket before that debris can be processed. The remote control, track, feeder, screen combo has been done. Conventionally, the crusher frame could stand alone and be mounted on a steel stand, portable chassis or track mounted frame. In Europe, there are several companies that have focused on similar concepts. However, such systems are too big to fit into a standard ocean shipping container without prohibitively costly disassembly. Moreover, the weight of such systems makes them costly to propel over land and relatively energy inefficient to operate. Additionally, such systems weigh about 30 tons, and the ratio of the area in square feet of their inlet openings of their crushing mechanisms to their weight in tons typically is less than 0.17.